Scholars › Philosopher / Thinker
Zou Yan
Qi thinker of the yin-yang school who taught that dynasties rise and fall by the cycle of the Five Powers and that the known world is one of nine great continents
A thatched pavilion open on three sides stands among tall bamboo; one person sits with their back turned at the veranda rail beside a zither and a stack of bamboo slips, while a stone path runs to a calm pond reflecting clouds and distant hills.
Zou Yan was a man of Qi who lived after Mencius. The Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) says that, seeing rulers grow extravagant and indifferent to virtue, he studied the waxing and waning of yin and yang and wrote over a hundred thousand words. He taught that dynasties succeed one another as each of the Five Powers, earth, wood, metal, fire and water, overcomes the one before, and that the land the classicists took for the whole world, which he called the Red Region of the Divine Continent, was only one eighty-first of it. Honoured in Qi, he was met outside the city by King Hui of Wei and treated with deference by the Lord of Pingyuan in Zhao, and King Zhao of Yan swept the road before him and built the Jieshi Palace to study under him. His books are lost, but the First Emperor of Qin adopted his theory and claimed the power of water for his dynasty.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; Qi thinker of the late Warring States